Discovering RED in Advertising, 1942: Candy as Food and Cigarettes as Tasty

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Part of the luxury of doing what I do is that I can down to the basement and pull out a giant bound volume of Life magazine from a long wall's worth of Life magazines and browse/graze away--a much easier thing to do with the volume in hand than it is to do online at the Life site. (Let me tell you that there is simply no comparison, and that you retain far more leafing through the volumes than scrolling down the monitor--try it out at the library next time.) For this particular volume--part of 1942--there was a growing realization that there was an awful lot of the color red being used in the advertisements, as though it had just been "discovered". And there was a lot of it being used to sell candy, cigarettes and, of course, meat.

This ad for Camel cigs is one with a minimal amount of red, though the use of it seems judicious and expansive to the major points of the message. Odd that the idea of "taste" appears almost as a secondary item of attention, and that the thrust of the copy is that lots of doctors happen to smoke Camel, without mentioning why. Well, the ad implies smoothness of smoke to the throat and the "T" section, for taste and easy impact on the throat, but the overwhelming message to me seems to be the smoking doctors giving an Rx to the cigarette.

On the other end of the attack to the human body was the notion that candy=food, an interesting way of moving a heart-busting luxury product, all wrapped in red outlining a white heart, evoking Valentine's Day and love, though this was love for candy itself, as the ad appeared in June.

The Meat Team--not a particular type pf meat; just meat, a red advertisement putting the "eat" in "meat". Red was also used for SPAM, which is a very democratic type of meat byproduct.

Another boost to candy as a food.

I'm probably all wrong on this, but that was the sense-impression I got from leafing through six inches of Life magazine for 1942.